Curaçao Faces Friction With Chávez Over U.S. Planes (Simon Romero)

[Judi Lynn]

Curaçao Faces Friction With Chávez Over U.S. Planes
By SIMON ROMERO
Published: July 11, 2010

HATO, Curaçao — This small island in the Netherlands Antilles might go unnoticed by its neighbors if not for the importance of the foreign interests it hosts: an American Air Force installation pivotal in fighting the region’s drug trade and a huge refinery that turns Venezuelan oil into gasoline.

Chafing at the American military outpost just 40 miles from Venezuela’s coast, President Hugo Chávez is testing Curaçao’s nerves by repeatedly claiming that the Dutch government, which oversees defense issues here, is letting Washington use Curaçao as a base for planning a possible attack on Venezuela.

The assertions come just months before Curaçao, which has relied for centuries on trade with Venezuela, will gain greater autonomy from the kingdom of the Netherlands when the Netherlands Antilles is dissolved as a unified political entity this fall. The Dutch will continue to oversee aspects of Curaçao’s foreign policy, though a vocal minority here favors full independence, and Mr. Chávez’s talk could stoke that thinking.

“When you are small, you have to be wise, and when the big ones are in a quarrel, small countries have to stay out of that,” said Helmin Wiels, 51, the leader of Pueblo Soberano, a leftist party here that wants to expel the American surveillance planes.

But for now, the breakup of the Netherlands Antilles is expected to be a largely uneventful political reorganization in which the Netherlands will maintain its control of defense and foreign-relations issues for all the islands involved, including continuing to allow the American aircraft to be based at Curaçao’s airport.

The planes have used the airport since an agreement was signed in 2000. The agreement will expire this year, and the Dutch have said they plan to approve a five-year extension.

Lt. Col. Brian Bell, who commands the American outpost, said in an interview, “Curaçao is strategically located near major trafficking corridors, which is one of the reasons why we’d like to remain here.”

The surveillance flights over the Caribbean last about 12 hours, resembling a cat-and-mouse game using radar to detect ships and small planes carrying cocaine.

In the region, the United States drug interdiction program also has planes based in El Salvador and Aruba and access to the Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras, and it recently gained access to several bases in Colombia. Venezuela is not alone, though, in Latin America in its unease over the American military’s role in the war on drugs. Ecuador recently terminated an agreement that allowed American military personnel to operate from a base on the country’s Pacific coast.

More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/12/world/americas/12venez.html?_r=1

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